This article highlights the importance of laughter in everyday speech, its social dimensions and the functions it can perform in verbal interactions. Polyseaemia of the term makes it difficult to take account of this phenomenon, which is both a psycho-physiological reflex and social behaviour, whether or not linked to humour. Ubiquitous in ordinary exchanges, the rire has a social dimension and adheres to culturally variable norms, allowing for sociological and anthropological approaches. On the other hand, it can shift from emotion-reaction (humoristic rire) to real behaviour that fulfils social functions (social rire). After an overflight of the phonetic dimension of the rire and the ways of transcribing it into the corpus, its social functions are observed at the level of verbal interaction.